1. "Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong."
"Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs."
"Being ethical is doing what the law requires."
"Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts."
"I don't know what the word means."
These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the
views many people have about ethics are shaky.
Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But
being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her
feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is
ethical.
Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical
standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious
people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the saint. Religion
can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics,
however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.
Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical
standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is
ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the old apartheid laws of present-day South
Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical.
Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most
people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate
from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good
example of a morally corrupt society.
Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is
ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about
abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my
beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a
survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics
with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being
ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues
which does not, in fact, exist.
What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well-founded standards of right
and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations,
benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that
impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and
fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and
loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the

2. right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of
ethics because they are supported by consistent and well-founded reasons.
Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned
above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to
constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics
also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct,
and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are
reasonable and solidly-based.
Ethics
The field of ethics (or moral philosophy) involves systematizing, defending, and recommending
concepts of right and wrong behavior. Philosophers today usually divide ethical theories into
three general subject areas: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Metaethics
investigates where our ethical principles come from, and what they mean. Are they merely social
inventions? Do they involve more than expressions of our individual emotions? Metaethical
answers to these questions focus on the issues of universal truths, the will of God, the role of
reason in ethical judgments, and the meaning of ethical terms themselves. Normative ethics takes
on a more practical task, which is to arrive at moral standards that regulate right and wrong
conduct. This may involve articulating the good habits that we should acquire, the duties that we
should follow, or the consequences of our behavior on others. Finally, applied ethics involves
examining specific controversial issues, such as abortion, infanticide, animal rights,
environmental concerns, homosexuality, capital punishment, or nuclear war.
By using the conceptual tools of metaethics and normative ethics, discussions in applied ethics
try to resolve these controversial issues. The lines of distinction between metaethics, normative
ethics, and applied ethics are often blurry. For example, the issue of abortion is an applied ethical
topic since it involves a specific type of controversial behavior. But it also depends on more
general normative principles, such as the right of self-rule and the right to life, which are litmus
tests for determining the morality of that procedure. The issue also rests on metaethical issues
such as, “where do rights come from?” and “what kind of beings have rights?”